Give Back: Clean Air

I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time. Just one, one, one.

– Mother Teresa

Art Culinaire believes the best communities give back generously: to the environment, to society and especially to those unable to remunerate. Our special culinary goal is to find strategic partners to effect change, not necessarily for the masses, as Mother Teresa quipped, but for: one family, one family, and one family…in India, Africa, Nepal…and yes, in the USA. With your participation, Give Back: Hope will provide one fairly inexpensive smoke-free biomass cookstove to a needy family for every Lacanche range Art Culinaire provides in the USA.

Cooking over an open fire indoors, estimated by WHO to effect around 3 billion people daily, causes 2 million people to die prematurely from illness attributable to indoor air pollution from household solid fuel use. In addition:

Fuel gathering consumes considerable time for women and children, limiting other productive activities and taking children away from school. In less secure environments, women and children are at risk of injury and violence during fuel gathering.

The lack of access to electricity for at least 1.4 billion of households (many of whom then use kerosene lamps for lighting), creates other health risks, e.g. burns and injuries, as well as constraining other opportunities for health and development, e.g. studying or engaging in small crafts and trades, which require adequate light.

Such cooking and heating produces high levels of indoor air pollution with a range of health-damaging pollutants, including small soot particles that penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for small particles. Exposure is particularly high among women and young children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth.

Our staff has personally experienced the devastation of debilitating effects poverty in many regions, including India, Africa, Central America and Nepal. Towards this end, Art Culinaire participates as members of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and are pursuing the very best cooking solutions for suffering families. We are happy to share our progress with you on this incredible journey of hope and discovery. With your help, many families will soon experience life without black soot.